Oh wow, it didn't take long for me to renew:

1. My domain registration.
2. My interest in blogging. 

Things are safe on the blog front for now, and like always, there are many big things in store for Jacks of Science which will one day come to delicious fruition for all.

So anyway, I'm researching in the U.S. this summer on a work placement. Living here I've had the privilege of experiencing the finer details of life which Canada lacks. Mainly, White Castle and an abundance of unsweetened iced tea but I still can't figure out what's the deal with the Imperial Units. 

When I'm homesick I just use Google for conversions to S.I. units. If that fails, which it has yet to, UnitConversion. But I admit, even meters, kilograms, and seconds can get a bit boring after a while. When that happens I have no choice but to use WeirdConverter (Turns out I only weigh 11% of a whale testicle).

If you've ever played Katamari Damacy for Playstation 2 then you'll know exactly what I mean. Info-rich game facts appear on the pause screen informing you that your Katamari ball is the size of 5 swordfish or perhaps 35 grandmas in width. Katamari Damacy is a great educational tool. It gives a unique sense of scale and teaches you that all measurements are relative.

There are plenty of obscure units to express our measurements in. Which begs the question: what made us settle on the standard units we did? It all boils down to an ongoing quest for finding a high accuracy measurement and agreeing internationally on a particular definition. Here are some of the weirdo ways our favorite units are defined:

• The Meter. Kind of a cop out, but if you get this crazy notion to fix (?) the speed of light in a vacuum at a constant number, like 299 792 458 meters per second, you can use the distance that light travels in 1/299 792 458 seconds to get a distance known as a meter. But wait, how do they know long is a second?
• The Second. Scientists needed a time measurement that was a bit more precise than "one Mississippi", so they set a second as the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of microwave light absorbed or emitted by a cesium atom moving between 2 energy levels at a temperature of 0 kelvin. But wait, how hot is a kelvin?
• The Kelvin. The International Atomic Energy Agency developed a standardized composition of pure water called Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water. They carefully obtained the triple point and absolute zero point of this water and set them as 273.15 kelvin and 0 kelvin respectively. You can divide this interval to get the individual units of degrees.